The lofting and transport of dust particles, which can be electrically charged and thus mobilized, pose a potential hazard to future lunar exploration. Dust particles can cover the surfaces of optical instruments, damage space suits, and degrade solar panels, as well as pose health risks if inhaled by astronauts.
While there is strong evidence that the lofting and transport of charged dust may occur on all airless bodies across our solar system and can dramatically reshape their surfaces, no missions have yet explored this phenomenon away from the lunar surface. On small bodies such as asteroids, Martian moons, and dormant comets, due to their low gravity, lofted dust particles are expected to be transported on a global scale or even escape from their parent bodies.
To learn more about how dust may affect future missions, NASA has awarded $1 million to a team from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) to develop a Rubik’s cube-sized instrument. Once built and tested, CEDA (Compact Electrostatic Dust Analyzer) will be capable of measuring the speed, size, and charge of tiny dust particles on rocky bodies less than 5 kilometers across.
“I’m grateful to NASA for the opportunity to develop this instrument, which will help us understand how dust is transported on asteroids and similar airless bodies,” said CEDA Principal Investigator Xu Wang, a research scientist at LASP and a lecturer in the CU Boulder Physics Department. “The results will show how dust lofting responds to changes in radiation and solar conditions, which is expected to have profound effects that sculpt the surface properties and might even change the orbital evolution of these bodies.”
The award, which will be distributed over three years, will enable Wang’s team to finish designing, building, and testing the instrument, and make it ready to propose for flight for future space missions.
As is common in space technology development, CEDA is based on heritage from a previous instrument, the Electrostatic Dust Analyzer, developed at CU Boulder’s IMPACT (Institute for Modeling Plasma, Atmospheres and Cosmic Dust) Lab with funding from NASA’s DALI program.
IMPACT is a multi-institutional member of NASA’s SSERVI (Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute) and includes partners from the university’s departments of physics and aerospace engineering sciences, LASP, the Colorado School of Mines, and numerous international collaborators.
The CEDA team includes Mihály Horányi, a LASP researcher and CU Boulder physics professor, and Doug Hansen, an engineer at Bear Creek Engineering, LLC.
By Terri Cook, Head of Communications Management
Founded a decade before NASA, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder is on a mission to revolutionize human understanding of the cosmos by pioneering new technologies and approaches to space science. The institute is at the forefront of solar, planetary, and space physics research, climate and space-weather monitoring, and the search for evidence of habitable worlds. LASP is also deeply committed to inspiring and educating the next generation of space explorers. From the first exploratory rocket measurements of Earth’s upper atmosphere to trailblazing observations of every planet in the solar system, LASP continues to build on its remarkable history with a nearly $1 billion portfolio of new research and engineering programs, backed by superb data analysis, reliable mission operations, and skilled administrative support.
